Threatened by a P30 billion cut, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto today called for the rechanneling of DepEd’s 2018 budget to “low hanging fruits” which can be used to increase a number of teacher’s allowances. If these “benefit amelioration” items will be added to the

The lawmaker who was the first to point out the tedious requirements in shipping balikbayan boxes today praised the order of Commissioner Isidro Lapena to freeze the Bureau of Customs’ guidelines on tax-free packages sent home by OFWs “as a blow against red tape.” Senate

The Senate may find fault in the PNP, but it also finds funding for them. And the Senate helps the police when it does both. Far from ingrates, the Senate has expressed its support to the PNP by not only approving, year in and year out, a higher budget for the PNP, but adds more

This second postponement must be the final one. It should be a non-extendable deferment. If we scrap again the elections in May, it will constitute a strike three against democracy. I am counting on the palabra de honor of Malacañang that this will be the last cancellation.

One post-budget enactment document the government can publish is a catalogue of performance guarantees issued by agencies, from how fast travellers should exit out of airport immigration queues to police response time. Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto, who made this

One way to fight crime and keep communities safe is through “extra judicial funding” which will modernize courts and equip public attorneys and prosecutors with the resources that will reduce case backlogs and move the wheels of justice quickly, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph

To borrow Kennedy, Senator Miriam’s mastery of the Constitution was awesome that when the best constitutional experts will be summoned to the Senate in the future, it can only be regarded as the greatest gathering of legal minds in one room, except when Senator Miriam dined alone

Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto today called for the initial doubling of the number of permanent job items in the Department of Social Welfare and Development— which he called the “contractualization capital” of the bureaucracy—due to its high number of temporary

About 150,000 inmates in 446 Bureau of Jail Management and Penology-run jails in the country may face “a forced last quarter diet” as their food budget is expected to run out by mid-October due to the surge in the number of detainees locked up for drug offenses. Recto said BJMP’s

The annual clothing allowance of 1.12 million civilian national government employees will increase to P6,000 next year, from the current P5,000, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto said today. The P1,000 hike for the purchase of what Recto describes as the “civil servant’s